I’m grateful to J. K. Gayle for drawing the data graphed above to my attention. It shows just how recently the obsession with being “biblical” and all things “biblical” began to take off. There is a lot that can be learned by looking at how the frequency of a word changes over time in publications. [Read more...]

I had my attention drawn today to a blog post by Donald Miller, “My Problem with the Word ‘Biblical’.” In it he writes: And so this idea that the Bible presents a comprehensive guide for relationships that is Biblical is, in fact, not a Biblical idea. Nor is it “biblical” for us to use the Bible as [Read More...]

I have mentioned before the need for an app that makes Biblical scholarship available to the general public for free. A recently-publicized app called “The Bible Scholar” illustrates why it is needed, rather than actually providing what is needed. The app is the King James Version of the Bible, Matthew Henry's commentary, and many other [Read More...]

If you're determined to be a Biblical literalist, or at least to pretend to be one (since no one is really one), you don't have to deny evolution. Indeed, there is a better option, that accepts that evolution occurred and says that God miraculously does evolution better than natural causes could! Since there is no [Read More...]

Given the title, this post could easily have been about contradictions within the Bible and whether they disprove Biblical inerrancy, or whether one has to start with the doctrine of inerrancy and insist that anything that appears to be a contradiction isn't really one. And I will come back to that. But the fact is [Read More...]

Logos software and Crossway books have made available for free, for a limited time, the ESV (English Standard Version), for use with the Faithlife Bible app. Click through for more details and to download the app if you don’t already have it, or just log in if you already have it to get the free [Read More...]

I recently heard someone emphatically assert that Biblical inerrancy is a Biblical doctrine. Many approach this topic by discussing the specific passages that talk about the “Word of God” or “writings/scriptures.” None of these says that the texts in question are inerrant, and some of them do not in fact seem to be talking about [Read More...]

As someone who teaches Bible, this cartoon Hemant Mehta recently shared made me laugh: It is funny that, through a series of twists and turns in the history of language, a reference to something being “Biblical” can turn it into sexual innuendo. This actually illustrates an important point about how languages work, a point often [Read More...]

My article “On Hearing (Rather Than Reading) Intertextual Echoes: Christology and Monotheistic Scriptures in an Oral Context” has finally appeared in the latest issue of Biblical Theology Bulletin. If you are not a subscriber and don’t have access to the journal through your library, you can read a pre-publication version via Butler University’s Digital Commons. Thanks [Read More...]